Booker T. Washington, Builder of a Civilization

by Emmett J. Scott; Lyman Beecher Stowe

Showing some of the teams of farmers attending the Annual Tuskegee Negro Conference.

In his annual report to the trustees for 1914 Mr. Washington said of these commencement exercises: "One of the problems that constantly confronts us is that of making the school of real service to these people on this one day when they come in such large numbers. For many of them it is the one day in the year when they go to school, and we ought to find a way to make the day of additional value to them. I very much hope that in the near future we shall find it possible to erect some kind of a large pavilion which shall serve the purpose of letting these thousands see something of our exercises and be helped by them."

The philosophy symbolized by such graduation exercises as we have described may best be shown by quoting Mr. Washington's own words in an article entitled, "Industrial Education and the Public Schools," which was published in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science for September of the year 1913. In this article Mr. Washington says: "If I were asked what I believe to be the greatest advance which Negro education has made since emancipation I should say that it has been in two directions: first, the change which has taken place among the masses of the Negro people as to what education really is; and, second, the change that has taken place among the masses of the white people in the South toward Negro education itself.

"I can perhaps make clear what I mean by a little explanation: the Negro learned in slavery to work but he did not learn to respect labor. On the contrary, the Negro was constantly taught, directly and indirectly during slavery times, that labor was a curse. It was the curse of Canaan, he was told, that condemned the black man to be for all time the slave and servant of the white man. It was the curse of Canaan that made him for all time 'a hewer of wood and drawer of water.' The consequence of this teaching was that, when emancipation came, the Negro thought freedom must, in some way, mean freedom from labor.

"The Negro had also gained in slavery some general notions in regard to education. He observed that the people who had education for the most part belonged to the aristocracy, to the master class, while the people who had little or no education were usually of the class known as 'poor whites.' In this way education became associated in his mind with leisure, with luxury, and freedom from the drudgery of work with the hands....

"In order to make it possible to put Negro education on a sound and rational basis it has been necessary to change the opinion of the masses of the Negro people in regard to education and labor. It has been necessary to make them see that education, which did not, directly or indirectly, connect itself with the practical daily interests of daily life could hardly be called education. It has been necessary to make the masses of the Negroes see and realize the necessity and importance of applying what they learned in school to the common and ordinary things of life; to see that education, far from being a means of escaping labor, is a means of raising up and dignifying labor and thus indirectly a means of raising up and dignifying the common and ordinary man. It has been necessary to teach the masses of the people that the way to build up a race is to begin at the bottom and not at the top, to lift the man furthest down, and thus raise the whole structure of society above him. On the other hand, it has been necessary to demonstrate to the white man in the South that education does not 'spoil' the Negro, as it has been so often predicted that it would. It was necessary to make him actually see that education makes the Negro not an idler or spendthrift, but a more industrious, thrifty, law-abiding, and useful citizen than he otherwise would be."

The commencement exercises which we have described are one of the numerous means evolved by Booker Washington to guide the masses of his own people, as well as the Southern whites, to a true conception of the value and meaning of real education for the Negro.

The correlation between the work of farm, shop, and classroom, first applied by General Armstrong at Hampton, was developed on an even larger scale by his one-time student, Booker Washington. The students at Tuskegee are divided into two groups: the day students who work in the classroom half the week and the other half on the farm and in the shops, and the night students who work all day on the farm or in the shops and then attend school at night. The day school students pay a small fee in cash toward their expenses, while the night school students not only pay no fee but by good and diligent work gradually accumulate a credit at the school bank which, when it becomes sufficiently large, enables them to become day school students. In fact, the great majority of the day students have thus fought their way in from the night school. But all students of both groups thus receive in the course of a week a fairly even balance between theory and practice.

An academic class. A problem in brick masonry. Mr. Washington always insisted upon correlation; that is, drawing the problem from the various shops and laboratories.